[In the following review, Pierson praises Metahistory as “a bold and imaginative book” and outlines the book’s key points of contention that will likely be debated by scholars.]

The discipline of history has remained relatively free from the close critical scrutiny which, in recent years, has been laying bare the metaphysical and methodological foundations of such neighboring disciplines as literary criticism, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and sociology. Significant inquiry into the nature of historical thinking has been confined largely to the pages of History and Theory and to works by philosophers—White, Dray, Mink, Gallie, Fain, and Danto. Serious self-scrutiny by historians has been limited to the important study by David Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, the works of George Iggers, and lighter efforts by Stuart Hughes and Peter Gay. Historians in general have shown little interest in investigating the nature of their craft and little awareness that many of their conventional forms of explanation have been called into question by major currents in modern thought. Historians have remained comparatively indifferent to fundamental philosophical issues despite the vital new perspectives on historical study which have been coming from the psychohistorians, the Marxists, cliometricians, and especially from the French “Annales” school.

Hayden White's Metahistory will make it difficult for historians to retain their philosophical innocence. White has attempted to clarify the nature of modern historical thinking, or the “received tradition,” by analyzing the work of major nineteenth-century historians—Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burkhardt—as well as the major “philosophers of history”—Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. His treatment of these figures is designed, in part, to show that the distinction usually made by historians between those who do history and those who seek to interpret the whole of history and arrive at a grand synthesis, is false. Historical thinking, according to White, is inescapably philosophical and metaphysical. In their efforts to marshall “facts,” weave them into a meaningful pattern of narration, and discover underlying relationships, historians must rely on modes of thought which are not empirical; they adopt distinctive forms of argument and different types of emplotment and they make aesthetic and ethical judgments. Even more fundamental than these forms in the making of the historian's consciousness or “style,” White maintains, is a poetic act which “prefigures” the historical field and enables the historian to begin his work. This initiating act of imagination involves the adoption of one of four possible “linguistic protocols” or “tropes”—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, or irony. On these “irreducible” linguistic foundations the structures of historical consciousness are built. The structures will differ according to the linguistic protocol adopted, for the protocols tend, because of certain “elective affinities,” to dictate the explanatory strategies the historian employs to tell his story.

White borrows from a philosopher, a literary critic, and a sociologist in distinguishing the explanatory strategies or the forms of argument, emplotment, and ideology used by historians. Stephen Pepper's fourfold theory of truth—Formism, Mechanism, Organicism, and Contextualism—provides the basic forms of argumentation; Northrop Frye's typology—Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire—makes up the basic modes of emplotment; Karl Mannheim's classification of social belief systems—Anarchism, Radicalism, Conservatism, and Liberalism—covers the range of ideological options. Beyond these direct influences on White's choice of categories one can recognize his debt to the “structuralists,” particularly Foucault and Lévi-Strauss, and to perspectives derived from Nietzsche, Marx, and Hegel. From these diverse sources White has constructed a complex and ingenious apparatus for analyzing historical writings.

Historians will encounter in Metahistory a terminology which is unfamiliar and rather intimidating. And they will leave to literary critics, linguists, and philosophers the task of assessing the ways in which White has developed his categories. But they will recognize that White's theory of the basic forms of historical thought has enabled him to offer fresh and illuminating interpretations of the historical thinkers with whom he deals. He displays a thorough command of their writings and if, at times, his categories take on a procrustean character, he recognizes that the greatest historical thinkers struggled to reconcile conflicting views of the historical process. His analyses of Marx and Tocqueville, in whom he sees a dialectical interplay between different tropes and differing modes of argument, emplotment, and ideology, are especially impressive.

Historians will quarrel with White's study in at least two ways. Many historians will not accept his claim that his “linguistic protocols” represent the irreducible foundation of historical thinking. The question here is not strictly speaking a historical question, but it has important methodological implications. To historians of a Marxist persuasion, or to those who believe that the social sciences provide the proper model for their discipline, White's insistence on the irreducibility of his tropes will appear to be a case of arrested analysis. They will reject the view that their “facts” are so largely the products of “tropes” or forms of consciousness and perhaps see in this feature of White's thought the antihistorical strain found in much of “structuralism.” These historians will argue that the changing modes of consciousness, including those of the historian, can be understood more fully by exploring their relationships with institutions or with shifting patterns of social and economic interests.

Many historians will also disagree with White's emplotment of modern historiographical development and the lesson he draws from it. White writes with a sense of mission; his book is informed by a desire to arouse the historical profession from its dogmatic slumber—a slumber which takes, paradoxically, the hyperconscious form of irony. He argues that historical thought during the nineteenth century moved beyond the Romantic, Tragic, and Comic postures which, in their various ways, conferred meaning and dignity on the human enterprise, to an ironic outlook. The ironic posture, according to White, arises out of a sense of the impossibility of establishing any common ground for historical understanding and results in skepticism and “moral agnosticism.” And while he concedes that none of the four basic “linguistic protocols” employed by historians can claim superiority in epistemological terms, White maintains that the historian can, and in fact should, make choices on ethical and aesthetic (or ideological) grounds. Indeed, he insists that the increased recognition of the ironic state of mind, to which his own study contributes, enables the historian to overcome it and renew the efforts of those nineteenth-century thinkers who sought guidance and inspiration from history.

One may accept White's claim that the dominant mode in modern historical consciousness is ironic without agreeing that such a mode necessarily destroys the capacity to judge and act in human affairs. Irony may function in various ways for the historian—as a means of reaching a relatively detached analysis, as a way of acknowledging the complexities and inescapable ambiguities of human development, or even as a mode of liberation from past institutions and belief systems. White's conception of the historian's consciousness is too simple to do justice to the ways in which the historian forms his values or relates his activities as a scholar to other aspects of life.

Moreover, White's call for ethical and aesthetic choice on the part of the historian is ambiguous. If he is simply pointing once more, as he does so effectively throughout his study, to the inescapable ideological element in historical writing and calling for greater self-consciousness on the part of the historian, few will object. But if, as seems more likely, he is offering an apology for the “engaged” historical writing which has become fashionable in recent years, and represents in fact an important qualification to his own generalization about the state of the discipline, many historians will disagree. They will be wary of premature commitments and be reluctant to abandon the effort to achieve broad perspectives which, for all the dangers of ironism, promise a wiser and perhaps a more compassionate view of the historical scene.

Still, White has given us a bold and imaginative book. At a time when much historical writing is occupied with narrow and trivial questions, he has challenged those in the discipline to consider anew the nature and purpose of their work. At the least White's study should bring historians to a new awareness of the forms of thought and imagination on which they rely. But Metahistory should also serve to remind historians of those perennial human concerns which make up the chief justification for their study.